Abstract:
Android Smartphones have earned massive popularity throughout the world. Social messaging application is an innovative way of sending and receiving text messages through the internet, basically it is an alternative to conventional SMS Services. These applications did not limit them to just two-person communications but group messaging, stories sharing and media sharing added charm to in-the-moment content. With increased functionality, comes complexity. The same happened to social messaging applications as the world has witnessed a huge increase in crimes. Most common social messaging applications are Whatsapp, Viber, and TelloTalk, based on feature richness and user accessibility. In this research work, these applications are forensically analyzed to see how and what artifacts can be collected at different stages; especially how much data can be recovered if data/chat or application is deleted. Moreover, general anatomy of each application is discussed, where their databases, files and messages formats are analysed. At the end, comparison of these applications is made to conclude which one provides best security to its user. Keywords: Digital Forensic, Forensic Investigation, Mobile Forensic, Social Messaging Applications, Android Framework.
